synesthesia – Nell Shaw Cohen

May 11, 2015May 11, 2015

Music Inspired by Art in the Whitney Museum’s Collection

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the stunning new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the Meatpacking district of New York City. Three of the artists prominently featured in their wide-reaching inaugural installation of works from the collection, American is Hard to See – Charles Burchfield, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Chiura Obata – have been primary inspirations in my ongoing work of composing music in response to visual art. Each of these artists engaged with nature, place, and spirituality, and conveyed a powerful “musicality” in their images, although in very distinct ways.

If you’ve recently visited the Whitney, plan to visit in the future, or if you’re just curious, I hope you’ll enjoy perusing this little guide to music I’ve composed inspired by artists in the Whitney’s collection. Think of it as an art & music pairing menu!

Charles Burchfield

The Whitney has an exceptional collection of works by Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967), and it was at the Whitney at their 2010 exhibit Heat Waves in a Swamp that I had an impactful first experience with seeing his paintings and drawings in person.

Several of Burchfield’s early paintings are now on display on the 8th floor of the Whitney in a section dedicated to art related to music and sound. Appropriate, then, to pair these works with some music related to art!

My compositions inspired by the works of Charles E. Burchfield include an orchestral tone poem and a one-act opera (listen above).

Watercolors, my wind quintet inspired by four of Burchfield’s paintings, was performed at the grand opening of the Parrish Art Museum. Visit Beyond the Notes to see a complete video of that performance and to learn about Burchfield’s paintings.

Chiura Obata

On the seventh floor of the Whitney, you’ll find eight woodblock prints by the (in my opinion, vastly under-appreciated) Japanese-American painter and woodblock print designer, Chiura Obata (1885-1975). It’s a special opportunity to see these rarely-displayed works.

Obata’s woodblock prints and watercolor paintings of Yosemite, the High Sierra, and the internment camp in Utah where he and his family were imprisoned, inspired my piece Dai-Shizen (Great Nature) for flute and guitar (listen above). This piece was commissioned by Devin Ulibarri and Alicia Mielke and premiered last June at Boston GuitarFest. Learn more about Obata’s artworks and my music.

Georgia O’Keeffe

My journey creating music inspired by art began in 2009 with Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), an artist long-celebrated by the Whitney. Summer Days, one of many exquisite paintings that emerged from the landscape of her adopted home in New Mexico, is on display on the 7th floor. A few of her abstract works are also visible on the 8th floor.

My music inspired by O’Keeffe’s paintings – especially her vision of New Mexico – has included an art song for soprano and chamber ensemble; an orchestral tone poem (listen above); and a multimedia video work (watch below). Visit Beyond the Notes to learn about Georgia O’Keeffe and my music.

September 23, 2011September 24, 2011

Beyond the Notes: Music Inspired by Art

I’m very excited to announce my upcoming recital, Beyond the Notes: Music Inspired by Art. The concert will be a multisensory, multimedia experience featuring live chamber music performed by wonderful NEC student musicians coordinated with video and slide projections of the art that inspired it.

Beyond the Notes: Music Inspired by Art will be presented at the New England Conservatory of Music on November 2nd, 2011, 6:00-7:30pm in Pierce Hall (241 St. Botolph St, Boston MA). Reception to follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Beyond the Notes screen capture — Beyond the Notes website as seen on a mobile phone

The concert will be enhanced by an accompanying digital companion, which will be launched within the next couple of weeks. Visitors are invited to browse the website ahead of time, or before and after the concert in the hall or on their phones, and explore video clips, audio excerpts, photographs, and information about the artists and music.

The new website will highlight Watercolors, a wind quintet inspired by the paintings of Charles Burchfield, in addition to the portion of the website featuring the string quartet The Course of Empire, which was posted in July.

The section on Watercolors features video clips from a fascinating interview with Nancy Weekly, Curator at the Burchfield Penney Art Center; Carol Steen, painter and co-founder of the American Synesthesia Assocation; as well as a movement-by-movement analysis of the connection between my music and the paintings, which is interspersed with audio excerpts and relevant images from the paintings.

While The Course of Empire and Watercolors are being highlighted on the website/app, every piece on the program has its own dedicated page and content. Other pieces featured on the program and the accompanying website include:

Setsugekka for violin and piano, inspired by Japanese woodblock prints by Hiroshige. The website will include videos introducing the genre of Japanese woodblock printing, and the traditional theme of setsugekka (snow, moon and flowers). This section features text and narration by independent print scholar John Resig (ukiyo-e.org).
To Create One’s Own World for soprano, flute, bass clarinet, and marimba, and The Faraway Nearby video piece with chamber score, both inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe. The website will include audio clips, song text, and the online video of The Faraway Nearby.
Revealed in Stone, a song cycle for tenor and piano inspired by the sculpture and poetry of Michelangelo. The website will feature an analysis of the English translation of the poetry used in the cycle.
Triptych for solo guitar, inspired by the formal structure of triptychs (especially as seen in Medieval art). The website will include a comparison of different genres of triptychs.

Both the concert and website have received support from the Entrepreneurial Musicianship Department at NEC.

May 28, 2011June 1, 2011

A Charles Burchfield Pilgrimage

I’m currently on my first road trip shooting footage for Beyond the Notes (see this post for a description of the project). The primary purpose of this trip is to collect material for online videos about American painter Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), the artist who inspired my wind quintet, Watercolors, and orchestral tone poem The Sphinx and the Milky Way. (See this post for more about my interest in Burchfield, and the paintings that inspired Watercolors.)

My pursuit of all things Burchfield has taken me to Buffalo, NY and surroundings, where the painter spent much of his life. Yesterday I visited the Charles E. Burchfield Nature & Art Center in Gardenville, a community center and park on Buffalo creek. There I caught a glimpse of his former home and studio where he lived and painted from 1925 to his death in 1967 (a private home across the street from the park), and filmed and photographed woods and flowers that evoked some of the nature scenes in Burchfield’s paintings.

Charles Burchfield, The Moth and the Thunderclap (1961)

I continued onto the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo to visit the stimulating exhibit Sensory Crossovers: Synesthesia in American Art, which “provides an unprecedented opportunity to consider synesthesia through the work of some of the 20th century’s most significant artists, luminaries such as Charles E. Burchfield, Arthur Dove, Max Weber, Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe and Adolph Gottlieb.” (source) It was intriguing to see diverse works from both Modernists and later artists that dealt with the translation of music and sound into visual art. The exhibit features a number of wonderful works by Burchfield (including the bold The Moth and the Thunderclap); excerpts from his sketchbooks on display document a language of abstract forms and symbols, through which he sought to express the music of Sibelius and Wagner.

Filming at the Burchfield Nature & Art Center

After taking in the exhibit, I had the pleasure of filming an interview with Nancy Weekly, longtime head curator at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, co-curator of Sensory Crossovers, and author and editor of a number of essays and books on his work. (I recently enjoyed this book by Weekly.) She was wonderfully generous with her time and expertise, and spoke with me on a number of topics relating to Burchfield’s work, including the importance of music in his paintings; and the phenomenon of synesthesia in art.

With this informative interview, I am hopeful that Beyond the Notes will become a valuable and entertaining resource for anyone interested in exploring Burchfield’s art, especially visitors who may not have the motivation to seek out books on the topic.

Tomorrow takes me to The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY, where I’ll be shifting my focus back into the 19th century and the monumental landscapes of the Hudson River School.

May 25, 2011June 1, 2011

Beyond the Notes: companion for arts events

For the next few months, I will be focusing on the development of Beyond the Notes (beyondthenotes.org), a new kind of multimedia companion for arts events. Each “digital program note” on Beyond the Notes will accompany an event, and may include video interviews, audio excerpts, slideshows, and other interactive features, which will be accessed by audience members on a website or in the concert hall (but not during the performance!) via a mobile application supporting iPhone, iPad, and Android.

By producing websites and mobile apps rich with interactivity and substantive content, I hope to inform and enhance audiences’ experiences of the performing arts and visual arts, and to facilitate communication between artists and their audiences.

From now through September, I will be producing a pilot Beyond the Notes website and mobile app to complement a performance of my string quartet The Course of Empire, based on paintings by Thomas Cole, at the Peabody Essex Museum on July 30 in coordination with national touring exhibit Painting the American Vision.

Beyond the Notes will also accompany my recital at New England Conservatory in October, which will feature The Course of Empire and other music inspired by visual artists including Charles Burchfield (Watercolors and The Sphinx and the Milky Way), Georgia O’Keeffe (The Faraway Nearby , From the Faraway Nearby [orchestra piece], and To Create One’s Own World), Michelangelo (Revealed in Stone), and Hiroshige (Setsugekka – mp3s coming soon).

I will be closely blogging and tweeting the production process for the Beyond the Notes pilot. My first exciting step: a road trip this weekend to film an interview with Nancy Weekly, leading Charles Burchfield scholar and Head of Collections and Curator at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY.

I’ll also be heading to Catskill, NY to do research at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and to film landscape footage in the region that inspired Cole’s monumental paintings. In June, I’ll be interviewing Linda S. Ferber, Senior Art Historian at the New-York Historical Society, an expert in Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School artists; as well as Carol Steen, artist and founder of the American Synesthesia Association, for a segment on synesthesia in art and music.

The first Beyond the Notes website/app is being funded in part by an Entrepreneurial Grant from the Entrepreneurial Musicianship Department at New England Conservatory. (My first Entrepreneurial Grant, awarded in summer 2010, supported the creation of The Faraway Nearby, a multimedia video piece inspired by the New Mexico paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe.)

This pilot project is an experimental vehicle towards developing a new model of media enhancement for music and arts events. If successful, I plan to start a service creating websites and apps for small arts organizations ranging from galleries to theater companies.

May 2, 2011May 8, 2011

Charles Burchfield and “Watercolors” for wind quintet

Autumnal Fantasy (1916-44) — Autumnal Fantasy, 1916-44. Private collection.

I am fascinated by the works of American painter Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), and was inspired by his visual world to compose a wind quintet and an orchestral tone poem (The Sphinx and the Milky Way). The premiere of my wind quintet Watercolors, the winner of NEC’s 2010-2011 Honors Ensemble Composition Competition, will be performed on Thursday, May 12th at 8:00pm in Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory (290 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115) by Andra Winds, who were selected this year as an NEC Honors Ensemble. I’m very honored to have my work performed by this talented group in beautiful Jordan Hall.

Charles Burchfield, An April Mood (1946-55) — An April Mood, 1946-55. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Watercolors references four watercolor paintings completed during Burchfield’s late period (the mid-1940s-60s). Although the paintings were not created as a set, I selected them for their complementary contrasts and connections.

Burchfield’s dynamic style and almost psychedelic imagery are arrestingly unique. His haunting paintings speak of a spiritual world of transcendence, redemption, decay and renewal, and he depicted the wonders of nature (the patterns on a sphinx moth’s wing; moonlight filtering through the petals of a sunflower) in an artistic voice that is as distinctive as it is beautiful.

Charles Burchfield, Glory of Spring (1950) — Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring), 1950. Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY.

Each movement of Watercolors reflects my impression of an individual painting. The paintings depict natural environments in different seasons or moods, from the barren rainstorm landscape seen in An April Mood to the luminous forest of Glory of Spring. At times, musical references to the visuals are direct (the bird or insect-like motifs in Autumnal Fantasy, for example), but more often than not, my music is an interpretation of the paintings’ overall atmospheres.

It is interesting to note that Burchfield himself was a passionate music fan (which helps to explain why his paintings are so suggestive of music). His copious journals reveal that he favored Beethoven, Wagner, and Sibelius, and created artworks inspired by his listening. Burchfield was sensitive to sound, especially the sounds of nature, and some of his paintings contain abstract patterns that directly represent sounds (see Autumnal Fantasy, The Insect Chorus [1917] or Song of the Telegraph Poles [1917-1952]). These images pulsate with energy, and imply a world of sensory experience.

January 31, 2011February 24, 2011

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Favorite Music

I visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum for the second time in 2010, while I was in New Mexico shooting footage for a multimedia video piece relating to O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings. While filming the locations that formed the basis for many of her paintings, I sought to gain some insight into the sources of her inspiration. O’Keeffe paintings are somehow very musical in character, and I’ve wondered how, if at all, music had influenced her (even if indirectly). I knew that she had some personal interest in music, as is obvious from the titles of paintings such as Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, or Blue and Green Music. O’Keeffe herself had played the violin at an earlier point in life, and she considered singing to be “the most perfect means of expression”.

While in Santa Fe I met with museum curator and prominent O’Keeffe scholar Barbara Buhler Lynes, who was kind enough to point me towards some leads for research. I described the video project to her, and how my work is propelled by a musical response to O’Keeffe’s paintings ”“ the musical texture, timbre, and harmony that I imagine as the musical environment in which her visual world would exist.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 (1918)

Ms. Lynes directed me to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center Library, where I read an essay on O’Keeffe and music by a former curator for the museum, Heather Hole, which was written for a program by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. The library also had a complete log of the LPs that were found in O’Keeffe’s possession after she passed away in 1986. This essay, the list of musical recordings, and my later tour of O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu, helped to illuminate the role that music played in her life.

Ms. Lynes explained that O’Keeffe was influenced by the concept of synesthesia ”“ the experience of “crossed senses”, i.e. hearing images or seeing sounds ”“ as it had been explored by European modernists such as Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). These artists sought to find the equivalents of music in color and imagery, and to find a universal language in art that transcends the specificity of language or direct representation.

According to Heather Hole, O’Keeffe had been influenced by one of her teachers at Teachers College of Columbia University, Alon Bement, who had played music in his classroom and directed the students to “draw what they hear”. From early in her career, O’Keeffe appreciated the abstract quality of music because it seemed somehow essentialized or pure, and freed from the superficial details of representational art.

Once she had permanently settled in New Mexico in the late ’40s, O’Keeffe had a high-quality McIntosh stereo system installed in a peaceful and spacious room in her Abiquiu home. There she would lay in her favorite lounge chair, gazing beyond a wall-sized window at an elegantly framed salt cedar tree, and absorb recordings with full attention. She supported the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival early on in its existence (during the latter decade or so of her life), and invited musicians to perform for her in her home, where she would listen to them, often with eyes closed. In Hole’s article, one of the musicians related how she would listen with a striking intensity of focus.

Her large library of LPs included primarily classical music. Interestingly, O’Keeffe didn’t seem to listen to very much music by then-contemporary composers. Perusing the catalog, I spotted just one or two records each of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Gershwin, and Ives, as well as an Edith Piaf album and some odds and ends.

Although she was friends with Aaron Copland, and owned a record that he conducted, she didn’t seem to be a fan of his music ”“ despite the fact that today’s listener would likely consider her landscape paintings “Coplandesque” in their evocation of American pastoral sensibility, or a classically American earthiness and simplicity of language.

Above all, O’Keeffe collected music of the 18th and 19th centuries ”“ Beethoven, Schumann, Haydn, Bach, etc, and surprisingly to me, a quantity of Monteverdi madrigals, sacred music and operas (including multiple recordings of the opera “The Coronation of Poppea”) ”“ which were relatively obscure at the time she was listening ”“ as well as Verdi and Wagner operas.

Although O’Keeffe is associated with the Modernist and Abstract movements in visual art, it seems natural that her musical tastes reflected the lush, lyrical, conventionally emotive quality of earlier music, rather than the harmonic and rhythmic explorations of the early-mid 20th century. The shapes in her paintings are rounded and flowing, the colors rich, and her paintings are often strikingly passionate and direct in their emotive quality ”“ yet always balanced, elegant, and poignant in simplicity, like a Classical sonata or Romantic Lied.

January 22, 2011January 31, 2011

Seeing Music in O’Keeffe

I’ve been aware of Georgia O’Keeffe for as long as I can remember thanks to my parents, who hung a poster of Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 in my childhood home. But her artwork first grabbed me in 2004, when I saw an exhibit of her paintings at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. I was captivated by the elegant undulating forms in her paintings, and was especially intrigued by her surreal images of magnified animal bones and flowers looming over skies and distant landscapes.

Georgia O'Keeffe, From the Faraway Nearby (1938) — Georgia O'Keeffe, From the Faraway, Nearby (1938)

A few years later I found myself mining visual art as a source of inspiration in my music, and exploring the idea of creating musical works that acted as an equivalent or a translation of visual experiences. I began imagining a musical language or aesthetic that would relate to O’Keeffe’s visual world.

My first O’Keeffe-inspired piece was an orchestral tone poem, written in 2009. Since this initial work, I’ve composed two more pieces in the search to create a musical equivalent to my experience of her artwork (To Create One’s Own World and Into nowhere), the latest of which developed into a video project fusing my musical and visual interpretations of O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings.

I’ve taken a cue in my works from O’Keeffe’s idea of “The Faraway Nearby” (from the title of a painting, above). I feel that this phrase refers to a certain quality, which is captured in her juxtapositions of delicate, emotionally evocative objects (flower blossoms, animal skulls and bones, twisting tree branches) with landscapes of monumental, seemingly infinite, scope.

For me, the idea of “The Faraway Nearby” is the feeling that an object, place, artwork, or experience that is vast (epic?) can also be deeply intimate, and understood in a personal way that transcends explanation. Master symphonists have been noted for their ability to evoke an epic-yet-personal quality (Beethoven and Mahler come to mind).

I feel that this quality relates to the virtually universal human response to nature or landscape as spiritual, powerful, and mysteriously significant. O’Keeffe clearly experienced this response more poignantly than most. She wrote that she wanted to explore through her art “the unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding ”“ to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.”